Sea anchors are known in the nautical arts and are used for many purposes. Sea anchors are somewhat in the form of a parachute, and are deployed beneath the surface of the water and resist moving through the water. A sea anchor may be used to more or less anchor a boat against the movement of the wind and surface currents when it is desired to fish from the boat, for example. A sea anchor may also be very useful with a boat that is used for trolling. In larger boats, both inboard and outboard, and also the inboard-outboard variety, it is often not possible to slow the engine down to a proper point for achieving the necessary low speed for trolling. A sea anchor may be used to slow the speed.
Prior sea anchors are generally fixed in the extent to which they can provide resistance to movement through the water. Thus, while a given sea anchor may be quite satisfactory for obtaining trolling speed with one boat, it may be entirely unsatisfactory for a different boat. Furthermore, conventional sea anchors are difficult to return to the boat, except for certain sea anchors that may be inverted for retrieval. However, such latter anchors cannot then be redeployed without being taken on board the boat, thus precluding the possibility of repositioning the sea anchor relative to the boat without entirely removing the sea anchor from the water.